There is a whole art to buying the right watch for someone, in fact, even for yourself. You can pop down the local market and pick up a cheapy that will probably last you until you bang your fist too hard on the table. There is the slightly more upmarket one that you could pay a few hundred quid for. There is a choice of styles, colours, materials, sizes, the choice is endless.

For the sportier person there are diver's watches, aviator's watches, sailing watches and even golf or racing influenced watches. Most will have slight variations on your run-of-the-mill watch and some will just have colours associated with your particular sport or engraved signatures just to make it that little bit different.

Then you have your luxury watch. You don't have to rise far in the ranks of socialdom to know that a watch is an immensely important status symbol. That little bit of metal wrapped around your wrist doesn't just tell you the time, it speaks volume about the sort of person you are, about what you expect from life and about what you expect from others. It defines you as a person.

A bit extreme you may think but take a visit to your local gold club will show you all the men extending their left arm slightly more than the right in order to display their luxury watch. Personally, I wouldn't know the difference between a leather one from a local chain store and one that cost the wearer a thousand pounds but there are those that do know the difference and those are the people that count (apparently).

A new trend in the owners of luxury watches shows a leaning towards vintage watches. These, to the rest of us, are old watches, used and showing signs of long term wear, but sporting a price tag that takes the breath away. I'm sure I have one of those in the back of my drawer but I doubt it would fetch the same price.

Of course, if you wanted a luxury watch that someone else would struggle to match you should have snapped up one that was fashioned from salvaged bits of the Titanic. A snip at 150,000, pounds there are only a limited number in existence and were sold out within 48 hours of going on the market with a famous footballer being handed the first one!

So, apart from having a fragment of metal from the Titanic, what does this luxury watch have that others don't? Well, the Day and Night watch has that added dimension of not being able to tell the time. Encrusted with sapphires and mounted on a strap of crocodile skin, the face is divided into two sections - a dark half to signify night time and a lighter half to depict day time.

There is no hour, minute or second hand and simply divides time between day and night. A world unique, the makers say. They also say that anyone can buy a luxury watch that tells the time but it takes a more discerning individual to buy a watch that doesn't.

Profound words indeed! So, for the price of a small house you can buy an old bit of metal from the bottom of the sea, put it on a watch that will tell you all the information you could gain from simply looking out of the window and no more. Surely, once you had shelled out that sort of money for something so useless, you would be better off employing someone to slap you round the face and be ready with the smelling salts.

At my guess, the manufacturers of this luxury watch must have extremely large windows to see all those fools coming with their barrow loads of money.